


On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living Among Spectres

by kvikindi



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Ettersberg, Gen, Ghosts, Mourning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:59:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5112161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What is a specter made of? Of signs, or more precisely of signatures, that is to say, those signs, ciphers, or monograms that are etched onto things by time. A specter always carries with it a date wherever it goes; it is, in other words, an intimately historical entity."</p>
<p>Nightingale and his ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living Among Spectres

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through _Foxglove Summer_. More-or-less canonical through _Body Work_ #4.

_"Spectrality is a form of life, a posthumous or complementary life that begins only when everything is finished. Spectrality thus has, with respect to life, the incomparable grace and astuteness of that which is completed, the courtesy and precision of those who no longer have anything ahead of them... These specters are so discrete and so elusive that it is always the living who invade their homes and strain their reticence."_

* * *

  
Stupidly, it isn't until they've exited the river, hauling themselves weighted and dripping onto the bank, that Nightingale realizes where the Thames has cast them ashore. Chelsea, he'd thought, or close; somewhere far upriver from Deptford, which was where he and Peter had started out. Convenient. Central. That makes him suspicious. Then he sees the garden gate running parallel to the embankment, and the gilt insignia set into it: golden Apollo wielding his bow and his arrow, slaying the serpent. He sighs and pushes his wet hair back from his eyes. Well. It _wouldn't_ be an accidental place, would it?

Apollo's face is impassive, incandescent. It's everything a proper god's face ought to be: no mercy, no sorrow, no triumph, even.

Peter spits a piece of bracken onto the pavement and says mournfully, "Eurgh, that's disgusting. I don't even want to know what else might be in my mouth." Ideas seem to occur to him, in spite of the sentiment. He looks ill. "I should just start a full course of antibiotics now, shouldn't I? Christ."

"Abdul's not terribly keen on antibiotics," Nightingale says. He sounds distracted, even to himself. "He tells me they're overprescribed, they're breeding— I forget what he calls it. Some variety of insect."

"Superbugs," Peter says. "MRSA."

"Mm. He says the next plague will be one of our own making."

"Cheery bloke," Peter grumbles.

Nightingale isn't paying attention. He feels cold and very heavy, though in fact it's a brilliant autumnal day— the plane trees along the Embankment all bursting with yellow, sunlight turning them into a copper haze, and the air still holding some heat of summer. Traffic is passing. Modern cars, he reminds himself: quiet engines, which means it's 2015, which means the worst is over. It's the most comforting thought he can muster, some days.

"Sir?" Peter asks uncertainly. "Are you all right? Should I—"

"Perfectly all right," Nightingale assures him briskly. He rolls the damp cuffs of his sleeves up with delicate precision. His coat had got lost somewhere in the Thames. "Given that the Thames ladies have been so good as to render us up, perhaps we ought to pursue our original aim."

Their original aim, in this case, being the pursuit of a Viking drinking horn that had changed ambiguously human hands in Deptford, at what Peter assured Nightingale was a very fashionable record shop. (Nightingale received this assurance with some suspicion. It certainly did not look like his idea of a fashionable record shop.) Seeing as the Viking drinking horn might or might not possess the capacity to shatter buildings, if not actually to trigger some form of Old Norse apocalypse (in addition to being the stolen property of a Bergen museum, which Nightingale considered altogether a lesser matter), the Folly had seen fit to undertake its recovery. Unfortunately, it appeared to be in the possession of a supernaturally booted person— a Spring-Heeled Jack? Nightingle wonders idly— who, when the cry of "Isaacs!" went up, had promptly kicked the two of them into the Thames.

"Right," Peter sighs. "Our original aim. The. What do you call it. Gatlerhorn."

Nightingale corrects him: " _Gjallarhorn_. I suppose it's no good going back to Deptford."

Peter shakes his head. "I reckon Zach's goblin 'mates' will have cleared the whole place out. We'll have to track down the warehouse."

"Drier clothes first, I think."

Peter groans. "I can already see the look on Molly's face when I tow you in looking like that."

Nightingale says contemplatively, "I suppose to her we must all seem rather fragile."

"Fragile! Yeah, like a Tiger Tank."

The tank jokes have long since grown rather old, but Peter's quick grins makes them easy to take. Even foiled and soaked and flung about, Peter is all warmth and light and energy, a ferocious sunburst, his nascent signare often a little like new scotch. It's almost enough to keep Nightingale's mind off things.

They walk in companionable silence up towards Sloane Square— the Jaguar being significantly downriver. Their clothes chill and dry in the mild October air.

"Nice of Mama Thames, anyway," Peter says into the silence. "To chuck us out so convenient-like. To chuck us out at all. I thought she didn't do that kind of thing."

"No," Nightingale says. Then: "It wasn't kindness."

They are headed away from the Physic Garden, with its black gates, and its solemn Apollo, so easy to overlook, and its faint smell of flowers (medicine, funerals, death, memory). Past terraces, then: on the left, the high bulk of hospital complexes. On the right: the Royal Hospital, its burial ground, with flowers still blooming at some of the graves; the National Army Museum. War. Medicine. Funerals. Death.

_Getting you out of Germany,_ Arthur had said, _with that bullet in your shoulder, that was the best thing I ever did. What did they call you back then? Your lot. The little Nightingale?_

Arthur Toynsby. Corporal. He'd been an old man. No longer the black-haired soldier from Germany. They had all been old men, then.

_You saved my life,_ Nightingale had told him.

_Is that why you visit? Don't get many visitors, these days._

_No._

Without looking at Peter, Nightingale says, "I used to visit the Physic Garden often. Regularly, even. In the nineteen-eighties. I would bring a friend in the afternoons... They collect succulents, orchids. Naturalists brought flora back from the Indies. It's very peaceful. It's almost four hundred years old."

"Almost as old as you," Peter says, deadpan.

Beneath the lip Nightingale sees his very precise expression: Peter knows there's some meaning in what he's been told, but he can't quite manage to parse it. Peter often assumes this expression when Nightingale speaks. Peter, Nightingale thinks, is an anatomizing man: he likes to cut things right open and see how they lie; he likes to be blunt and meticulous. To him, the notion of a cypher is unnecessary. Or maybe he simply doesn't harbour yet the sorts of things that you can't say without a cypher, because the cypher is written right into them. Under the skin of the mystery is no skeleton at all. No anatomy. You don't want to look under that skin.

They ride the Tube from Sloane Square back towards the Folly. Fellow-passengers glance at them below covert eyelashes: Nightingale's wet hair, Peter's wet coat. Wool holds the water inside, stays heavy. The smell of wet wool is London in late autumn. Another era. The train rocks. Nightingale closes his eyes, just for a moment. He wants to travel just a little in time, but he's stubbornly, stubbornly bound to this body. This body, inseparable from other bodies: knitted close into the neat fabric of London, all the implacable stitches like knots in a line.

Later, at dinner, Peter talks around his real question: Why did Mama Thames... why that place? Nightingale doesn't tell him what he thinks, that he thinks it was a reminder. _I am something supernatural_ , he thinks; _not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element..._ Where had he read that? A poem, or a play?

And how many days had he gazed at the gold mouth of Apollo, helping Arthur by the hand as they slowly traversed the little stone paths, the scent of lavender in flower, brambles heavy in their tangles, on their prickly vines. Empty-eyed Apollo, with radiance around him. Did you want to slay dragons? he seemed to ask. To take up my bow of burning gold? My arrows of desire? That was what you wanted, wasn't it, Thomas?

_Where is David?_ Arthur would ask him, over and over. _Where is David? I never see you without David. We haven't left him behind, have we?_

_David's dead, Arthur._

_He's never!_ His eyes turning wide and amazed. Not alarmed, because Nightingale was joking, surely. _David? Dead? He was only here yesterday!_

But David had been dead forty years by then.

You can't save a life, as it turns out, in the long run. Gods and ghosts and spirits and angels, they all know this. What you can do is love someone— you can love the sharp shoulders of their jacket, their nervous and overly urgent movements when doing something quite banal, like turning a newspaper page or writing a shopping list; you can love the damp after-shaving touch of their warm soft jawline, their tendency, at distracted moments, to hum an A-flat. You can love someone and say For Christ's sake just get on the _fucking_ glider already will you please please—

That's love. But it isn't saving a life.

Nightingale thinks about this, paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth, until the soup is cold and Molly and Peter are looking at him. He swallows rather hastily and keep eating: a mechanical motion. He feels Molly's eyes at the back of his neck. (You know me too well, he thinks, and of course she does. No one has ever known him as Molly knows him.)

"I should just think," he says to Peter, "that you know what rivers are like by now. In fact, I should think you better-informed on the topic than I am."

Which causes Peter to flush a dark mahogany colour and squirm in his seat uncomfortably. So the conversation comes to an end, and Peter flees shortly thereafter, undoubtedly to telephone his river and, oh, probably gossip and complain, or whatever it is young people do on the telephone for hours. Nightingale can't imagine. So many words! How can they excavate so many words from themselves?

As for himself, he leaves the Folly and walks down by the river. People are out in scarves and light jackets, though the evenings are starting to be cold. The river sloshes against its own containment, smelling heavy and fertile with silt and rot. Nightingale leans out over the embankment railing. The South Bank spreads out before him, glittering and strange, like its own fairy kingdom. There are boats; laughter; _slap, slap_ goes the water, mouthing hungry at every object.

"I'm only human," Nightingale says out loud. And indeed he never feels more human than when he deals with them: the old ones, the Thames rivers. They have known him as a child and as a man. There is no use being proud; there is no use pretending. Perhaps he finds that a comfort.

The water doesn't answer.

Nevertheless: "You like me better when I'm not," he says. "Is that it? Much easier to negotiate with." All _daimones_ together. No mortal concerns. The way that it had almost been for so many years, for all the years in between; those silent years when he lived with Molly, and lived too with the dead. There were times when he wouldn't speak for a week. He wonders if they ever feared he'd go mad.

"But I'm human," he says. "That's the point of this arrangement. Expect me to act like a human if you pull another such infantile trick."

He supposes it was Tyburn, almost certainly, who engineered the stunt. She's always found him amusing to toy with. But this isn't politics. You have to show people the line and say, _Do not cross it._ This is his line. Let the dead stay dead.

He turns his back on the river and walks away again.

Three days later, he and Peter will find the Viking horn abandoned on a shelf at a Hampstead Waitrose. Just an old horn that Vikings had drunk from once. Nothing magical about it. The thief or thieves must have realized too late. All that unnecessary fuss.

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," Peter will say, and then, when Nightingale looks at him, uncomprehending, "Oh, come on! That's not even before your time!"

"I suppose the museum will want it," Nightingale will say. "—After all, it is still historic." And he'll lift the horn with gloved hands to carry it away: a smooth hard curve that someone had polished a long time ago. It carried a vestigial trace of firelight and honey, a faint taste of seawater. But what ghosts it had once held will have long since dissolved, laid to rest in their unremembered graves.

* * *

_"But there is also another type of spectrality that we may call larval, which is born from not accepting its own condition, from forgetting it so as to pretend at all costs that it still has bodily weight and flesh. Such larval specters do not live alone but rather obstinately look for people who generated them through their bad conscience... While the first type of spectrality is perfect, since it no longer has anything to add to what it has said or done, the larval specters must pretend to have a future in order to clear a space for some torment from their own past, for their own incapacity to comprehend that they have, indeed, reached completion."_

* * *

 

There are no ghosts in the Folly. Well, there wouldn't be, would there? If the very seat of British wizardry was unable to keep its own house clean... And Molly would never stand for it, of course. She doesn't like sharing.

After the war, though— they'd left so many possessions, was the thing. Such a concentration of materiality. Starched shirts folded, still perfectly buttoned. Boxes holding sets of cufflinks. Books half-filled with annotations, a dog-ear marking the edge of a page. Letters that they would never reply to; letters they had replied to and saved, tied up with paper string or ribbon. Photographs. Shoes. A favourite tea cup. How do you disinfect death from so many things? You can't. You don't. Ghosts couldn't enter the Folly, but a handful of them still came back. They would loiter outside the Folly, looking pale and uncertain. They didn't understand why they couldn't get in. To the general public, they must have been indistinguishable from the background. Young men in well-cut suits, a little cold if you brushed against them. You might have thought something about them was a little strange; but their memory refused, somehow, to linger. 

Nightingale tried giving things away, tried burning their papers, so he wouldn't have to look them in the eye. In the end he had to reason with them, one by by one.

David didn't come back, but then he hadn't wanted to. There are those who would call that a mercy.

All this is to say... there are no ghosts in the Folly. And Nightingale has, all things considered, surprisingly little experience of haunting. Or, well, English haunting. (Sometimes he wants to tell Peter: "I was trained as an Orientalist, you know. I wasn't trained for this." But he suspects Peter will not understand, and that furthermore Peter will fix him with that long-suffering look of tolerance, as though Nightingale is a child that has said something inappropriate, and say, "Ah, yes, the Orient," or something similar.)

So he considers himself somewhat underprepared to cast a ghost out of Bethnal Green Station, especially since there oughtn't be a ghost to cast out. 

"The whole station was scoured," he tells Peter, perplexed, when Peter fills him in. "In, oh, I should think somewhere about the early Fifties. The air raid disaster, you know. There were reports of ghosts. But we took care of it."

Peter pauses. "We?" he repeats, picking up on some obscure inflection.

"Well, not me personally." He looks away. He can't remember precisely when it was that the Folly sent someone to Bethnal Green. It's not that it was so long ago. It's that those years are a room he doesn't wish to reenter. Behind the door is a grey spiny shapeless mass, something that wants to touch the back of his neck with cold fingers. He remembers sleeping a great deal and dreamlessly back then. Or, unsleepingly, during the late hours of the night, making the floorboards creak with his tread, feeling like he was walking off some kind of opium craving, or an injury, like he was afflicted with a phantom limb. A bodily hurt that had no real existence, nerves shrieking from something he'd already lost. He used to dry-heave, as though he could get rid of the sickness. Molly would find him and sit with him, without speaking, till dawn.

So. "I suppose it can't hurt to have a look," he says with some reluctance.

It's the week before Hallowe'en, which once people didn't celebrate, though there's always been _something_ , as he says to Peter's questions. Not always death, not always the dead, but always some sort of celebration. Or perhaps celebration is not the right word for it. After all, Bonfire Night's hardly a celebration, really. More of a riot. But it's a powerful time of the year.

And perhaps that's why the ghost has appeared. Then again: why this year, why this decade? He's often thought that ghosts must operate according to some complex schedule to which the living lack access. 

"A natural cycle," Peter suggests. "Like an algae bloom. Or— like a comet."

Nightingale squints at him in incomprehension. "Are comets the ones that burn up? I always forget."

Peter makes an exasperated noise at him. 

"One does wonder," Nightingale says, more reflectively, "what mechanism comes into alignment to produce the phenomenon of a ghost. David thought they were related to _vestigia_ , but they can't really be the same kind of thing— unless we say life itself is uncanny. Which I suppose perhaps it is." He looks down at his own hand, turning it over. Considering. "Some life more than the rest. But— still. We are energetic creatures."

"That was almost scientific," Peter says. He eyes Nightingale unreadably. It's almost gentleness that's in his expression. Perhaps he feels embarrassed by it, because he clears his throat a moment later. "We should... "

So they go. 

In the end, the ghost in Bethnal Green has nothing to do with the air raid disaster. Really, Nightingale thinks, that would have been too on the nose— instead it's a young punk rocker, or what Peter refers to as a "seen kid" ("Seen by whom?" Nightingale asks him). The ghost himself, when they corner him down on the tracks, insists that he is an "urban explorer."

"I don't understand your meaning," Nightingale says.

"It's like— Tube stations what have been closed down and secret reservoirs and all, innit? The city _under_ the city. The one they don't want you to see."

Nightingale feels, if anything, more confused. " _They?"_

"Yeah, like, the government! The corporations!" The boy looks very ghostly, a pale form in the darkness, gesticulating with sincerity. "Because there's got to be more to it than this, you know? Like— you got to get under the surface."

Peter puts in, deadpan, "Literally."

"This can't be all there is," the ghost says, and he looks Nightingale in the eyes. His eyes are very large and surprisingly beautiful, despite their lack of substance. Nightingale is caught by the intensity of them. He can't look away. Inexplicably, a cold shame floods him. "This can't be all there is," the ghost says once more. "Right? I just got to keep looking a little longer. There's going to be more. This can't be all there is. This can't be all there is."

Peter shakes his head. Nightingale can see that he can't quite bring himself to say it. It's too grim.

So Nightingale himself steps forward. He pitches his voice gently. "What's your name?" he asks the young man.

"Jonny," the ghost says, and swallows hard. His eyes are spooked now, like an animal's. At some level he knows, even though he can't bring himself to accept it yet. 

Nightingale talks to him for a long time. He says all the usual things. "It's not fair." "There's nothing to be done." "It's not fair." "You have to let go now." "It's not fair." "That's what being dead means." He's dimly aware of this empty chatter, of the stream of his voice low and reassuring. The boy cries and refuses, but then grows calm, and after a reasonable amount of time he begins fading away. When he is a white chalk mark in the blurry dark air, Nightingale finally stops speaking.

Further on they find the boy's rucksack: Army-style, military surplus, slightly charred. Peter stoops to fetch up the olive drab strap. When he stands again, slinging the bag onto his shoulder, he says, "You're really good at that, you know."

Nightingale says, "I've had a great deal of practice."

They don't talk on the way back to the Jaguar. When they reach it, Nightingale pauses before starting the engine. He stares out through the windscreen, not seeing the civilian crowds that pass. "Sometimes," he says, "I think it would be kinder to burn them." 

The days of the dead are unkind. Threaded with violence. Bonfire Night arrives— with its panoply of fireworks, of course. Once almost every street had a bonfire. Nightingale remembers them burning. As though London had caught fire again, year after year, as though ghost incendiaries had come alit; as though it said, _See: I did not die, but I am still burning_. The smoke rose thin in offertory fashion. 

The fireworks, now, disturb Nightingale's dreams. Late at night, when one too many has burst, startling him from a ragged sleep, he treads silently down to the library door. _The_ library door. He lets his hand hover above the surface. The barrier hums underneath his skin. It had taken a long time to make, and quite a lot of it had hurt. At the time, that had struck him as inconsequential. How abstract, the notion that his body could suffer. 

He thinks himself alone in the dim narrow hallway. He isn't, possibly, fully alert. Then Peter says from behind him, quietly, "Why do you keep it?"

"What makes you think I can destroy it?" Nightingale doesn't turn.

Peter doesn't answer.

Nightingale sighs and lets his hand drop. "Because they died for it," he says at last.

"That's not a good enough reason."

"Isn't it?" His thinking had been quite different. He knows, without having to look, that Peter is wearing a certain expression. An archangel expression, it might have been, if Peter had lived in a different time and caught a painter's notice. An infinitely magisterial look. Peter has moral probity. He, Nightingale, has not. There are worse reasons to take an apprentice. _I, too, am infected with death, but I can't exorcise myself, so instead I'll train you to do it._ Is that what he had thought?

He turns tiredly. Peter is leaning against a wall, clad in jeans and a t-shirt. His expression is indeed very righteous. Nightingale regards him for a while. "I can't sleep," he says, his tone light and self-mocking. "Sorry."

Peter shrugs guardedly. "'S all right. You didn't wake me. I was up." A patent lie. A pause. "Thought I'd see what was on the telly. Rugby, maybe."

"At this hour?"

"Satellite television. It's a brave new world." He turns with an awkward half-gesture, motioning Nightingale to follow.

Nightingale does. But he says, "You haven't read the play, have you."

"Huh?"

" _The Tempest._ 'Brave new world.'"

"I might've done. A bit. Are you really going to lecture me about Shakespeare?"

They ascend, leaving that skeletal hallway behind them, exiting the kitchen for the courtyard and the cold night air. There's a current of smoke that makes Nightingale uneasy— it is, he thinks, an animal reaction. He forces himself to stand still and breathe it in. Sooner or later he has to learn not to flinch. He'd been going to tell Peter that the brave new world is brutal, that Prospero's daughter is delighted because of her innocence. She doesn't know yet the things that men do to each other. But maybe, he thinks, maybe they've all read it wrong, all those centuries of cynics. Maybe she's right to celebrate more life in the world, when, after all, the alternative is stagnation. Death. Isn't that what everyone wants: life, more life?

"I suppose it doesn't matter," he says. He keeps his voice neutral. "You're right. Brave new world."

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title, the summary, and the quotations that head each section are drawn from Giorgio Agamben's "On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living Among Specters," which I have woefully misused here.
> 
> The quote that Nightingale can't quite place, which begins, "I am something supernatural," comes from Anne Carson's interpretation of Euripides' _Bakkhai_. Just make up a context in which Nightingale would have encountered it.


End file.
